Passive-agressiveness goes to extremes I have not seen before in 1970’s Bartleby, a UK adaptation of a story I was shocked to learn was written by Herman Melville. I’m tempted to seek out that original short story, but I doubt whatever I find there would be as much of a shock as when I found this picture described as simply a drama on IMDB and assorted reviews I have perused. What has me so surprised is I thought it was an incredibly strange comedy for most of the runtime, only to be deeply confused by a sudden and severe shift at the conclusion, when turns it into a severe tragedy.
John McEnery is the title character, a man enervated enough to be the poster child for chronic fatigue syndrome. He is almost like an anthropomorphized turtle, dragging out every line in a painfully drawn-out manner that had me yelling at the screen the words you know he will be getting around to eventually. And, for most of the film, those words are “I…would…prefer…not…to”. Mere ellipses cannot convey the length of these awkward pauses.
These, or variations on those words, will be said mostly to Paul Scofield, the manager of an accounting office who has quickly come to regret hiring McEnery. The unusual employee has been very politely declining all assignments in this manner. He is even living in the office, something Scofield is slow to discover, yet the manager still can’t find it in himself to fire McEnery. Before the start of a workday, the manager even waits in the hallway in stunned silence as McEnery finishes getting dressed, after appearing at the door in his undershirt.
I was fascinated by the performances of both McEnery and Scofield. It is like the former is a rock which is immobile, but which can withstand the strongest wind. The latter is not a strong enough personality for me to describe him as a force that tries in vain to wear away the rock, so much as he is frustrated by his own inability to conjure up that much of a fight. As he tells a friend played by Thorley Walters about Bartleby, “He’s just so civil.”
Something should have scanned as off about McEnery from the moment he appeared at the office for the job interview. The candidate is pliant and amenable to a fault: “The salary is not important. Anything reasonable would be alright.” Even his acceptance of the job offer is spoken in a manner I not seen outside of the quirky shtick of 80’s comedian Emo Philips.
He is also clashing with the handful of other employees in the office. One coworker is especially outraged over having to pick up the slack for the work McEnery deigns to perform. There’s also a young guy who appears to be the mailroom’s sole employee, and he tells a mildly ribald joke to McEnery, which either the man doesn’t understand or doesn’t find funny. We see how a complete absence of reaction becomes a sort of hostility, in a manner similar to how silence can be confrontational.
All we know of McEnery’s past is a previous job working in the post office’s dead letter office, which feels appropriate. When we first see him, he’s arriving in London by train and he checks something into a locker at the station. Even without knowing anything about him at this point, I suspected these were the entirety of his possessions. From what we see, he seems to have gone from one job to another like this, and I assume living in the office of each place he’s worked, before moving on to the next.
If there is one thing he seems to enjoy, it is walking and observing. Still, we never know what he thinks of any of the people he observes. One moment that feels appropriate, though I can’t qualify exactly why, has graffiti on a wall behind him reading, “WE ARE THE WRITING ON YOUR WALL.” Something so simple and self-explanatory just feels right for this very odd character. Those words do not reveal anything more than the exact sentiment of those words, and the title character is like that. Any deeper meaning one imparts upon his actions are fabrications of the viewer and those conclusions reveal more about the one making the assumptions than they do the object of those.
It is on the first of those walks that I started wondering if this vague definition of a man even truly existed, or if he was some kind of living ghost. People conversing with each other briefly and barely part ways to let him pass through, without breaking stride or skipping a word. It was like how one unconsciously steps out of the way of something inconsequential and later, if they gave it any thought, would not be able to recall what they had been avoiding.
There’s also an odd feeling of an ending of an age, as this is set at the time when the peace and love era of the late 60’s was souring into something worse. On one of his walks, McEnery observes some young people hanging out in front of a theatre that is showing Let It Be, the sad documentary about the end of The Beatles.
Speaking of music, the soundtrack is yet another solid work by Roger Webb. I mostly know him from a stellar library album of his titled Moonshade. That work is similar to what he does here: slightly jazzy numbers with an odd tinge of melancholia.
I mentioned in the opening paragraph I thought this was a comedy, and I am hard-pressed to make that case in writing. There aren’t any humorous lines, per se, but something just felt increasingly like an absurdist comedy as we watch each additional request from Scofield be met with the title character’s trademark “I…would…prefer…not…to”, or some variation of it. What is odd is this type of humor (if that is what it is) is more akin to edgier modern comedy than anything from its own time.
The best word I can think of to describe the title character’s personality in Bartleby is “resigned”, and that is not just because he appears to have resigned from a succession of jobs in the most passive-aggressive manner possible. So many today are “quiet quitting” their jobs, and I suspect some of those people might see a kindred spirit in McEnery. Still, I doubt any of them have so devastatingly effective a technique as McEnery has. I can also imagine a new take on this story set in our modern world. Alas, I doubt it would be as powerful as this picture and, if I was asked to watch it, I would have to say, “I…would…prefer…not…to…”
Dir: Anthony Friedman
Starring Paul Scofield, Paul McEnery
Watched on Powerhouse/Indicator blu-ray (region-free)